Archives

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News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2024).

Administrator changes

• Elli
• HouseBlaster
• Pickersgill-Cunliffe

• Brianga
• De728631
• Georgewilliamherbert
• Hyacinth (deceased)
• ProveIt
• The Night Watch

Technical news

• Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)

Miscellaneous

• The Community Wishlist is re-opening on 15 July 2024. Read more

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Precious

Five years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:24, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		For your amazing work in geocoding — The Anome (talk) 14:07, 18 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2024).

Technical news

• Global blocks may now target accounts as well as IP's. Administrators may locally unblock when appropriate.
• Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee appointed the following administrators to the conflict of interest volunteer response team: Bilby, Extraordinary Writ

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I accidentally screwed up the article about smoke grenades. I don’t know what the heck I did, but that page is broken. So I am turning myself in as an unintentional vandal. Professor Penguino (talk) 13:26, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I undid your page move. (I think you could have done this yourself, since the redirect you left at Smoke grenade had no history other than your move.) Anyway, no problem. Deor (talk) 13:33, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much!

I did try to undo my own edit, but it kept saying the operation failed. All’s well that ends well! Professor Penguino (talk) 13:44, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, what I originally wanted to do was capitalize the first letter of the article. On my end at least, it looked like “smoke grenade” and not “Smoke grenade”. It didn’t work, so I thought it was a glitch. Instead I decided to move the article to another name first, and then move it to “Smoke grenade.” When I tried moving it, I got an error message. When I tried undoing my move, I got an error message. And that’s when I realized I screwed up. Professor Penguino (talk) 13:47, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Professor Penguino: Yes, for some reason there was a {{Lowercase}} template at the bottom of the article, and that's what was causing the title to appear as "smoke grenade" rather than "Smoke grenade". I've removed it. Deor (talk) 13:51, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you again! Professor Penguino (talk) 13:53, 12 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is it possible to have my access to Wikipedia pages, except my personal page and its talk page, blocked for one year. I need to take that time to reflect on my situation in Wikipedia. Dominic Mayers (talk) 01:18, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Dominic Mayers: I haven't any objection to blocking a user who requests a block; but I don't believe I've ever done so, and I'm not sure what you mean by "access". As far as I know, if I fully block you, you'll be able to edit your user talk page but not your user page and its subpages (and you'll still, of course, be able to view any Wikipedia pages, just not to edit them). If you want to end your block before the year is up, you'll have to request an unblock on your talk page.

Alternatively, I could do a partial block preventing you from editing mainspace pages and their talk pages, and you'd still be able to edit your own user page and talk page (as well as other non-mainsapce pages).

As you might perceive, I'm waffling a bit here because I'm not really sure what you want. I can see that you may be frustrated by some interactions at Talk:Epistemology, but perhaps just staying away from that article for a while may be all that's needed. Can you clarify exactly what you want to be prevented from doing here? Or you may be more comfortable asking one of the admins in Category:Wikipedia administrators willing to consider placing self-requested blocks, who doubtless have more experience than I with this sort of thing. Deor (talk) 02:07, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's OK. I did not explain myself well. Can you block me in writing for the main space, the associated talk pages, and the wikipedia space and would this still allow me to modify my personal page and its talk page ? Dominic Mayers (talk) 02:19, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

All right, I've blocked you from article, article talk, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia talk pages for one year. If you want the block removed before it expires, you can just ask me here, since you should still be able to edit User talk pages. Deor (talk) 02:31, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In the following quotation in Voltaire, I placed the period outside the quotation mark and you switched it back: "have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny." You are correct, of course, because, in the U.S., periods and commas go inside quotation marks. But Wikipedia, to my knowledge, does the reverse. I don't know the Wikipedia page that has punctuation rules. Can you let me know, and we'll check this point? Thanks. Maurice Magnus (talk) 11:27, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Maurice Magnus: The relevant Manual of Style guideline can be found at WP:LQ. The sentence covering the situation you've cited above, as I see it, is "When quoting a full sentence, the end of which coincides with the end of the sentence containing it, place terminal punctuation inside the closing quotation mark." Of course, this case is somewhat odd, since the quoted matter consists of both a partial sentence and a full sentence, so that if the quotation ended at "... in barbarism", the period would indeed go outside the closing quotation mark; but the guideline seems clear to me. Deor (talk) 14:35, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Deor: I agree, and I congratulate you on being one of the few, if not the only, Wikipedia editor who is aware of the different rules for complete sentences and partial sentences. I think it's crazy to make this so complex, as it results in its not being adhered to anyway. We ought to have periods and commas inside quotation marks in all cases, just as every other publication in the U.S. does. Maurice Magnus (talk) 15:01, 18 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

News and updates for administrators from the past month (August 2024).

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, there is a new criterion for speedy deletion: C4, which applies to unused maintenance categories, such as empty dated maintenance categories for dates in the past.
• A request for comment is open to discuss whether Notability (species) should be adopted as a subject-specific notability guideline.

Arbitration

• Following a motion, remedies 5.1 and 5.2 of World War II and the history of Jews in Poland (the topic and interaction bans on My very best wishes, respectively) were repealed.
• Remedy 3C of the German war effort case ("Cinderella157 German history topic ban") was suspended for a period of six months.
• The arbitration case Historical Elections is currently open. Proposed decision is expected by 3 September 2024 for this case.

Miscellaneous

• Editors can now enter into good article review circles, an alternative for informal quid pro quo arrangements, to have a GAN reviewed in return for reviewing a different editor's nomination.
• A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in September 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles and redirects in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 13,900 articles and 26,200 redirects awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!

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May I ask why this was reverted? Gregorcollins (talk) 23:44, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Gregorcollins: As I explained in my edit summary, the edit provided incorrect information about him: he was not the White House Chief of Staff. His position as a Reagan advisor doesn't seem important enough to mention, as compared with the positions held by the other people mentioned in that paragraph. Moreover, the inclusion was not supported by the reference it preceded. Deor (talk) 23:58, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reversion of my addition of the "Prometheus" Trilobite to the "vagina dentata" article. After a bit of research, I found an academic paper that discusses the feminist viewpoints portrayed in "Prometheus." It contains the following sentence: "In Prometheus, the Trilobite uses its many arms to draw the engineer into its vagina dentata where he is suffocated." None of that lame fandom "mouth" nonsense! So, I undid your reversion and added the Trilobite back in with this new reference. Please let me know if this entry is acceptable now. Beadbop (talk) 15:04, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I made a few tweaks, but it looks OK to me. Deor (talk) 15:23, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Since your reply, I also made a couple more tweaks to the reference section. All should be well now.

p.s. The academic paper I cited even has a photo of the Trilobite in Fig. 2, with the caption "The alien, Trilobite, and its representation of female anatomy and the vagina dentata, drawing inspiration from the octopus (Scott 2012)(©Twentieth Century Fox).

I love learning new things every day!  :) Beadbop (talk) 15:40, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I've seen this document [File:Claude Houghton, c. 1948.jpg] and I am pretty sure this is not a 1948 photograph. Hope to find an earlier source in order to share it on commons. Yours, Marc-AntoineV (talk) 11:32, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

And you removed 1609 of them not so stray at Kakanui Range ChaseKiwi (talk) 01:48, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@ChaseKiwi: Sorry about that; I must have misclicked. I've redone the edit properly. Deor (talk) 11:51, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Better detective work than my eyeball there. ChaseKiwi (talk) 17:45, 24 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2024).

Administrator changes

• Asilvering
• Significa liberdade

• Good Olfactory
• Hesperian
• I JethroBT
• TommyBoy
• Woody

CheckUser changes

• Barkeep49
• Izno

• Doug Weller
• Spicy

Guideline and policy news

• Administrator elections are a proposed new process for selecting administrators, offering an alternative to requests for adminship (RfA). The first trial election will take place in October 2024, with candidate sign-up from October 8 to 14, a discussion phase from October 22 to 24, and SecurePoll voting from October 25 to 31. For questions or to help out, please visit the talk page at Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections.
• Following a discussion, the speedy deletion reason "File pages without a corresponding file" has been moved from criterion G8 to F2. This does not change what can be speedily deleted.
• A request for comment is open to discuss whether there is a consensus to have an administrator recall process.

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Historical elections has been closed.
• An arbitration case regarding Backlash to diversity and inclusion has been opened.
• Editors are invited to nominate themselves to serve on the 2024 Arbitration Committee Electoral Commission until 23:59 October 8, 2024 (UTC).

Miscellaneous

• If you are interested in stopping spammers, please put MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist and MediaWiki talk:Spam-blacklist on your watchlist, and help out when you can.

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hiya, left a note for you continuing our discussion on the marianne moore talk page, am hoping for a response Potholehotline (talk) 21:46, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a survey of Wikipedians to better understand what draws administrators to contribute to Wikipedia, and what affects administrator retention. We will use this research to improve experiences for Wikipedians, and address common problems and needs. We have identified you as a good candidate for this research, and would greatly appreciate your participation in this anonymous survey.

You do not have to be an Administrator to participate.

The survey should take around 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement .

Please find our contact on the project Meta page if you have any questions or concerns.

Kind Regards,

WMF Research Team

BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 23 October 2024 (UTC) [reply]

News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2024).

Administrator changes

• Crisco 1492

• Babajobu
• Daniel
• Elf
• Jayron32
• Thue
• Wugapodes

CheckUser changes

Maxim

Oversighter changes

Maxim

Guideline and policy news

• Following a discussion, the discussion-only period proposal that went for a trial to refine the requests for adminship (RfA) process has been discontinued.
• Following a request for comment, Administrator recall is adopted as a policy.

Technical news

• Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068

Arbitration

• RoySmith, Barkeep49 and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2024 Arbitration Committee Elections. ThadeusOfNazereth and Dr vulpes are reserve commissioners.
• Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate from 3 November 2024 until 12 November 2024 to stand in the 2024 Arbitration Committee elections.
• The Arbitration Committee is seeking volunteers for roles such as clerks, access to the COI queue, checkuser, and oversight.

Miscellaneous

• An unreferenced articles backlog drive is happening in November 2024 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!

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Hello,

I recently invited you to take a survey about administration on Wikipedia. If you haven’t yet had a chance, there is still time to participate– we’d truly appreciate your feedback. The survey is anonymous and should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. You may read more about the study on its Meta page and view its privacy statement.

Take the survey here.

Kind Regards,

WMF Research Team

BGerdemann (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 13 November 2024 (UTC) [reply]

Hi Deor, I'm having a go at bringing the Anomebot online again. After such a long time, there's going to be a massive backlog, and I may need to write some category-based custom code to update the bot's internal logs to catch up with the backlog so it doesn't spend all its time checking articles that don't need upating at runtime.

Unfortunately, a bunch of Python 3 conversion of older code got lost in the crash/multiple backup failures, and I will have to re-do this. And there's lots of it to do. The Anomebot system is quite big, and has evolved over years.

Hopefully I will have all this done in a couple of weeks; this is a fairly low-priority project for me at the moment. — The Anome (talk) 12:39, 19 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It was easier than I expected: a shift to using the Python requests package has eliminated a lot of tricky code in the process, and 'just works', so the output part of the system is now working. The analysis side needs a bit more tweaking, though. — The Anome (talk) 23:22, 19 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@The Anome: OK, as you have probably deduced, I've been using your bot's contributions to identify articles that need coordinates. I won't be able to handle the backlog, no doubt, but so it goes. Deor (talk) 23:29, 19 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your patience in this. The article editing end of the bot is grinding its way through the backlog now, and will be doing so for several days. Unfortunately, about a year's worth of bug fixes went missing with the data loss, so it will also be re-making a lot of mistakes, and the re-try log data is also old, so it will unfortunately be revisiting some articles it shouldn't. However, I think this is a realistic price to pay for getting the bot back online now, instead of some indefinite future.

I've also just gone back and removed some questionable edits.

I'll see if there some way of mitigating some of these problems at some point soon, starting with getting the edit history out of Wikipedia's own logs and using that to bring the bot's internal edit log up to date. I've paused the bot run for now until that's finished. — The Anome (talk) 12:53, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've now dug out the missing edit history, and should be able to re-start the bot run at the weekend. Hopefully I will be able to go back to running the bot either once or twice a month from now on. — The Anome (talk) 14:41, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The bot run should now be complete. Another one to follow on 2-3 December. — The Anome (talk) 17:38, 24 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I see you have changed my single quotes to double ones in the article Virgil. They do look inconsistent, it's true. But I used single ones because the Wikipedia style guide recommends single quotes for glosses. But maybe it's not that important. Kanjuzi (talk) 14:41, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Kanjuzi: I think the examples at MOS:SIMPLEGLOSS show that what single quotes are used for is glosses of isolated words (note also that parentheses are not used around the glosses). For parenthetical translations of quoted lines of poetry, I'm pretty sure that double quotes are more appropriate. Deor (talk) 14:52, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2024).

Administrator changes

• Ahecht
• DoubleGrazing
• Dr vulpes
• FOARP
• Peaceray
• Queen of Hearts
• Rsjaffe
• SD0001
• SilverLocust
• Sohom Datta
• ThadeusOfNazereth
• Voorts

• Ajpolino
• Fathoms Below
• Pppery
• Tamzin
• Worm That Turned

• Aervanath
• Christopher Sundita
• Dank
• Dennis Brown
• Dragons flight
• Fastily
• Graham87
• JaGa
• Kbh3rd
• Marine 69-71
• Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington
• Yamamoto Ichiro

Interface administrator changes

• SD0001
• Sohom Datta

Pppery

CheckUser changes

• Spicy
• TheresNoTime

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RFC, the policy on restoration of adminship has been updated. All former administrators may now only regain the tools following a request at the Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard within 5 years of their most recent admin action. Previously this applied only to administrators deysopped for inactivity.
• Following a request for comment, a new speedy deletion criterion, T5, has been enacted. This applies to template subpages that are no longer used.

Technical news

• Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10, 2024.

Arbitration

• The arbitration case Yasuke (formerly titled Backlash to diversity and inclusion) has been closed.
• An arbitration case titled Palestine-Israel articles 5 has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 14 December.

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